China Study Group: Chuang Collective, "Sorghum & Steel" - Part 1

"In the late 16th century, one of the earliest long-form accounts of life within 'China' was released in Europe. The author was a Portuguese mercenary ... Afterwards he became a pirate on the South China Sea, pillaging coastal provinces in the beginning of what would become a centuries-long piracy epidemic facilitated by the growth of the global market. The Ming dynasty responded with its Piracy Extermination Campaign ... If there was any point of utter indeterminacy in the birth of the capitalist world, this was it. The die had been cast but had not yet settled. With the largest navy, the most advanced technology, and unprecedented agricultural productivity, the Ming Dynasty remained the most extensive and powerful political structure in the world. In every way it matched and surpassed Europe, and the question of China’s 'failed' transition to capitalism (known as 'Needham’s Paradox') would become a sort of initiatory riddle for future scholars of the region."

你好, readers!

What can we learn from the Chinese Revolution? That's the question we'll seek to answer as LMRG brings the heat to you once again, now on Tuesday nights, with our all-new China Study Group. In this long-form reading series, we'll meet monthly for in-depth discussion of a series of texts on China, its revolution, the socialist market economy, and more. As the New Cold War heats up, it's never been more important to learn what we can about the country which the US, UK and EU have all described - following the American phrasebook - as a "systemic rival".

For the first set of meetups within this series, we'll be tackling Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China by the Chuang collective. Chuang is an independent, autonomous collective of anti-authoritarian Chinese communists and labour activists whose work provides a rare opportunity for English readers to get vital detail on historical and contemporary dynamics within Chinese society from a materialist, communist, and crucially - balanced perspective. Sorghum and Steel will provide our Study Group with an essential foundation in Chinese history to equip us going forward.

For this first event in the series we'll be reading the introduction and chapter one - find the text here: https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/

Throughout this series, we'll give equal space to a wide variety of sources, from anti-authoritarian Chinese communists opposed to the contemporary Politburo to members of Xi Jinping's own ideological brain-trust. We'll dig deep into elements of the Chinese revolutionary experience such as the CPC's localist co-operative economics of the Civil War period, the forgotten grass roots of the Cultural Revolution, the Boulan Fazheng period and China's rejection of "shock therapy" as seen in the USSR, and the theory underpinning China's recent turn away from the liberal economics of the 2000s.

Take care everyone and happy reading!